Blade & Crown

Blade & Crown is a full-featured fantasy roleplaying game, suited for courtly intrigue, far-flung wilderness exploration, thievish derring-do in the bowels of a city or even dungeon-delving. Blade & Crown is ready for adventure — are you?

How does it feel to play Blade & Crown? It's a gritty system, with lots of detail. There are twelve basic characteristics, a pretty extensive (but not overwhelming) skill list, and no "classes" or "levels". You'll see a lot of influence from 1980's "realism".

But the game is also strongly influenced by modern, indie design. There's a strongly unified mechanic; the vast majority of the time, you roll the dice the same way. The system includes active enticements for players to design adventurous, complex characters. The system also gives you bonuses to your die rolls for describing your actions in unique and interesting ways.

And the system gives you, the player, some control over the narrative. Every character has Traits that can be used to make your character's life easier, or harder. If you use a Trait to help yourself, you gain dice or narrative control. If you use a Trait to make your character's life harder — which is to say, more adventurous — you gain tokens to allow helpful Trait use later on, and you gain experience points. Each character's unique Traits bring your roleplaying alive and help immerse you in your role.

Magic provides another way for players to have narrative control, as does religion. Magic has a mysterious, mystical air; religion reflects the vast array of beliefs and practices possible.

Social Class is important. Your wealth is derived directly from your social rank, for one thing, and if you're trying to enter a city yet look like a serf, the guards are unlikely to let you in. Wealth is abstracted, putting the emphasis on getting back to the game, instead of tracking pennies.

Blade & Crown errs on the side of having complete rules, rather than saying every situation comes down to GM or player fiat. There are rules for a variety of tactical situations in combat, developing magic spells, travel, and more.

The game is suited to a wide variety of adventures: plying trade routes in a cog, traveling the land as a company of actors, mapping the unexplored realms, solving mysteries in a manorial estate, tragic tales of love and conviction, seeking treasure in ancient ruins — all these stories and more are possible. The rules are flexible enough to make play fun for a variety of campaign types, and for a variety of play-styles.

What's included:

177 pages of content (not including introduction and other prefatory material).

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.